[This article appeared in the Winter
2004 issue of The Journal of Social,
Political and Economic Studies, pp. 455-467.]

Book Review Article

Eastern Africa as Seen Through the Eyes of a Realist

Dwight D. Murphey

Wichita State University, retired

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003

This book
gives an unflinchingly realistic description of life along the eastern side of
Africa, starting with Egypt and proceeding to South Africa.Although what it describes is appalling,
Theroux’s account has such honesty that it is compelling reading.Everyone interested in Africa should read
this book, but it should especially be read by those who, in a number of
contexts, prefer having a sugar-coated image of Third World peoples and their
prospects.These include those who are
persuaded that all humanity is ready to adopt American values and institutions;
those who believe that it is virtuous and meaningfully beneficial to extend aid
to Africa decade after decade regardless of the outcome; academicians who
specialize in “African development”; those blacks in America who as a matter of
racial ideology romanticize Africa as their spiritual home; and tourists who
visit Africa briefly and who while there necessarily see only areas designed
for their own enjoyment.To all these,
Theroux’s book is an antidote that they can take seriously or ignore, as they
choose.

Theroux is
an interesting person.Forty years ago,
he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi (then Nyasaland).He was a teacher there, for which purpose he
learned Chichewa, a Bantu language; but in 1965 Malawi
deported him for “aiding rebels” and he was ousted from the Peace Corps.He had driven a car “through the bush, two
thousand miles to Uganda” to deliver it to a man who had fled Malawi after
becoming entangled in a political power struggle with the man who emerged as
the ruler of Malawi for the following thirty years.Theroux bounced right back, and for four
years from 1965 to 1968 taught at MakerereUniversity in Uganda.Since then, he has traveled throughout the
world and has written a large number of travel books and novels (one of which
is still outlawed in Malawi).The book’s
back cover doesn’t exaggerate when it calls Theroux an “internationally
acclaimed author.” This is supported by Dark
Star Safari’s having
been named “a best book of the year” by the New
York Times, the San Francisco
Chronicle, the Seattle Times, and
the San Jose Mercury News.

Politically
and ideologically, Theroux defies definition.His unremitting honesty puts him outside the precincts of the
“politically correct” – and that is an awfully large precinct.Ideologically, he gives contradictory
indications: while he points one direction, for example, by saying that Maoists
in Tanzania had
a worthy intention in building a railroad there, he points an opposite
direction when he declares that illegal immigrants into the U.S.
are “no respecter of laws.”When his
travels take him to South Africa
at the conclusion of his journey, he is able to say, in an uncharacteristically
politically correct manner, that “the long political struggle had made a family
of all South Africans – a forgiving if a sometimes
unruly family.”This is somewhat
questionable after he has recounted that “there are twenty thousand murders a
year in South Africa and fifty-two thousand reported rapes, almost a quarter of
the rapes against small children and even infants” [many committed, as he says,
out of the belief that sex with a virgin is a cure for AIDS]; and after he has
told of “farm invasions ending in the disembowelment of the [white]
farmers.”In any event, he is reticent
about offering social or political analysis.He offers no “morals to the story.”Readers are left to draw their own conclusions from the facts he
describes.

Thus, his
great merit is that he is willing “to tell it as he sees it.”His observations are based on a
rough-and-tumble trip down Africa’s eastern side in 2001
(and a return visit in 2003).Eschewing
luxury transportation (if there was any to be had), he got down into the grime
and dust, riding “by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy,
ferry, and train.”His experiences could
result in quite a personal adventure story if he cared to tell it that way.

Theroux’s General
Observations

He reports
on each country as he comes to it. Before reviewing each country, however, it
will be worth noting his general observations.Theroux likes rural Africa, not because it is advanced but because he
respects the fact that its people have long cultivated a remarkable tenacity at
subsisting under all conditions. He loves, as well, the often-exotic beauty of
the country.But that is about it for
the “good news.”“Africa,” he reports,
“is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it – hungrier,
poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can’t tell the
politicians from the witch doctors.”The
Africa he saw on his recent trips “had slipped into a stereotype of itself:
starving people in a blighted land governed by tyrants, rumors of unspeakable
atrocities, despair and darkness.” Something he sees over and over again is the
“unnecessary obsolescence of buildings.Nothing was fixed or kept in good repair, the concept of stewardship or
maintenance hardly existed.”

He says
that “African cities did not even pretend to be anything except large slums…
Improvisation had taken the place of planning.”The cities “seemed to me miserable improvised ant hills, attracting the
poor and the desperate from the bush and turning them into thieves and divisers
of cruel scams….”

All of this
reflects, Theroux believes, the inner-being of the people.They live their lives with “a fatalistic
patience.”This evokes no sense of
building anything for the future.“We
build for the future… But it is a rarefied humanistic notion of the West, not
an African tradition.Change and decay
and renewal were the African cycle… [This is] a hand-to-mouth method, but a way
of life that had enabled people to get through dreadful times.”In sum, “it’s a subsistence economy, and
survival is something that Africans have learned.”

This
“survival” is of the group, not especially the individual.People are “old” when they are forty; “a man
of fifty was at death’s door, sixty-year-olds were just crocks and crones.”This would be counted as far short of “survival”
by individuals in the West.Atrocities of unbelievable magnitude take
their toll: “one million people died, mostly Tutsis, in the Rwanda
massacres of 1994.”And yet, the
population continues to grow more rapidly than anywhere else in the world,
“even with AIDS and infant mortality” [and famine and mass murder].

One might
suggest that the vast growth in population is itself the cause, or at least a cause, of the squalor Theroux saw in
the cities.In his recent article “What
Kind of Aid for a World in Want?” (The
Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Spring 2003, pp.
97-102), Seymour Itzkoff of Smith College told how in the Horn of Africa “the
annual population increase is acute: Somalia,
plus 2.89 percent; Ethiopia,
plus 2.68 percent; Eritrea,
plus 3.05 percent.”In “all of these
nations,” he said, “women give birth on average to
between 6-8 children.”Such growth is
not limited to Africa, but is characteristic of the Third
World.In The Death of the West, Patrick Buchanan
tells how the “the Third World adds one hundred million
people – one new Mexico
– every fifteen months.”

The
Population Reference Bureau (www.prb.org)
says that “Middle Africa is expected to be the fastest growing region in the
first half of the 21st century, growing to 193 percent of its
current size by 2050; western Africa follows, increasing
to 142 percent of its 2003 population.”Of course, war, famine and disease may deflect these projections.That the Bureau is taking disease into
account is especially apparent with regard to southern Africa,
where significantly it says the population has gone into “a decline that no one
would have predicted in the recent past.”Thus, “the population of HIV/AIDS-ravaged southern Africa
is projected to fall by 22 percent.”

If we
consider just the countries Theroux visited, we find the following projected changes
in population from 2003 to 2050: Egypt, 72 to 127 million; Ethiopia, 71 to 173
million; Kenya, 31.6 to 40.2 million; Malawi, 11.7 to 29 million; Mozambique,
17.5 to 19 million; South Africa, a decline from 44 to 32.5 million; Sudan, 38.1
to 84.2 million; Tanzania, 35.4 to 73.8 million; Uganda, 25.3 to 82.5 million;
Zambia, 10.9 to 17.5 million; and Zimbabwe, 12.6 to 4.6 million.

As the
population has swelled, people have poured into the African cities.It is a phenomenon seen many times
historically: it is reminiscent of Britons’ having moved out of rural poverty
and into the rapidly expanding manufacturing cities of the early industrial
revolution; of the newly-emancipated serfs crowding Russian cities at the end
of the nineteenth century; of Teheran’s burgeoning in size under the Shah as
millions migrated from the countryside; and of the cities of Brazil having been
swamped by a similar influx, with a vast growth in urban slums.

Theroux
doesn’t reflect on the relation of population to the excruciating poverty.What he does stress is the mental landscape
of the people, as just mentioned, which does not embrace a concept of building
for the future.Such a mentality lends
itself directly to squalor, and therefore no doubt deserves a significant part
of any explanation of the decrepitude of the cities.It is unlikely, though, that Theroux would
deny that the exploding population also plays a major role.

There are
additional factors that lend themselves to both the expanding population and
the living conditions.First, as we will
see, there is a mentality centered on the supernatural that seeks an animistic
explanation for events and that runs counter to the science we know. Second, in Theroux’s observations about Zambia
he tells of the Africans’ overwhelming preoccupation with sex.And,
third, researchers in comparative intelligence will no doubt observe that a
serious I.Q. deficit is fundamentally important.All of these combine
to produce the effects Theroux observes.They also bring about a devastating causal sequence: the primitivism
involves farming methods that, with the extra population, ruins the
productivity of the land and destroys the animal habitat; the worsened rural
poverty then promotes emigration to the cities (and to the developed nations of
Europe and America).

His Observations About Individual Countries

Here
briefly is a glimpse at the details he gives about the countries he passed
through. (A reader will notice a certain strangeness of style: Theroux uses the
past tense when reporting current observations.Despite the impression that gives, his book is very much a current
report.)

Egypt:In Cairo,
there were “back alleys that reeked of rotting food and litter, we passed
basins of dirty water and buckets of garbage and chamber pots that were being
emptied from upper balconies.”In
Aswan,
there was donkey feces everywhere, “the sound of car
horns and loud music… pestering beggars, lepers….”

Ethiopia: The capital, Addis
Ababa, is only a century old, but “had a look of
timeless decrepitude… dirty and falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed
people and sick animals, every wall reeking with urine.”Harar features beautiful women, but Theroux
can’t overlook “the beggars… they were old and young, blind, crippled, limbless
women and children, war-wounded, fingerless lepers.”Eight percent of the people are infected with
HIV, and there were 150,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2000. (It is worth reflecting on the fact that once
someone has died, he is no longer counted in the percentage of those with HIV.)
“There were many prostitutes within the
walls of Harar.”The streets are so
dangerous after sunset that “it was unthinkable to travel after dark.”

Kenya:
Theroux describes this as “one of the most corrupt and distressed and
crime-ridden countries in Africa.” Human life is cheap, with cattle having value
but human beings almost none.Forty
people were killed on the roads during the two months preceding Theroux’s
visit.Kenya’s
government receives bountiful aid money, but it is “a proven fact that this
money went into the pockets of politicians.”Despite the aid, Kenya
is “a rapacious and hungry and scavenging society,” where “men and boys stood
around in large groups, nothing to do.”

Malawi:
AIDS is rampant.In 2002, there were two
million orphans.The annual per capita
income was $200.Theroux recites a
typical experience: “Malawi
had the worst and most expensive hotels… Where is the service?There is no one to carry bags, no one sweeps
the floors, the room isn’t clean, the toilet is
broken.”Famine results in people’s
“eating boiled cassava leaves, digging for wild roots, and eating earthworms.” The
shopkeepers from India
were driven off years ago, but the shops have not been replaced by African
shops; instead, they stand as grim reminders of the African way of life: “the
roofs caved in, the windows broken, many of them vandalized with graffiti.”

Mozambique:
Theroux credits the Makonde people as being “some of the best artisans and
carvers in Africa.”Nevertheless, war, first against the Portuguese and then a civil war
between FRELIMO and RENAMO, resulted in “millions killed or displaced.”The town of Beira is “a ruin” with “abandoned
buildings on streets where grass had sprouted.”He tells how the Grand Hotel is now “a huge skeletal structure” taken
over by the homeless, some of whom “were emptying buckets of [feces] over the
[balcony] rails.” Theroux says “I saw no
positive results of charitable efforts.”

Sudan:
Muslims live in the north, Christians in the south, of this geographically largest
of the continent’s countries.The south
has experienced forty years of war.Theroux describes the people he saw on the streets of Khartoum:
“…the slash marks on one tribal face, the tattoos and scarification on another,
the knocked-out teeth or lip plugs of yet others.”

Tanzania:Under Julius Nyerere, Tanzania
closely mimicked Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and continued to do so long after China
itself abandoned it. The schoolbooks were all translated into Swahili, since
English symbolized imperialism. The
result after forty years of independence is that “that vast fertile country of
twenty million people had achieved a condition of near bankruptcy and had one
factory.”“In the capital almost half
the adults had no jobs.But those with
jobs did next to nothing.”He concludes
that “nothing had ever worked in Tanzania.”The roads are in almost impassable condition
– except the tourist routes (which are part of the Potemkin Village
created for outsiders).

Uganda:
Theroux’s description starts on an upbeat note: “Right from the frontier, Uganda
seemed a tidier, better-governed place than Kenya.”But this collapses under the weight of the
specifics.It, too, has two million
orphans from AIDS.The university at
which Theroux taught in the 1960s is now falling to pieces.Prostitutes are ubiquitous, and “everything
was on the wane.”The country
experienced nine years of terror under Idi Amin.Now, however, “Uganda,
even in its apparent recovery, was a welfare case.”The welfare comes from donor countries, who
contribute over half the country’s budget.

The reader
gets a feel for the local color and conditions when Theroux recounts how people
collect grasshoppers and white ants to fry, and that children amuse themselves
by flying rhino beetles attached to a string.

Zambia:
An AIDS worker, a woman from Finland,
told him: “There is so much sex.It is
all sex.And so young!...
Ten years old is common.”She added: “No
one will talk about AIDS, and everyone is infected.”When she tried to talk with people in the
villages about it, the result was that “they wanted to have sex with me.”Earlier, we discussed the role of exploding
population as a cause of the cities’ squalor.What this Finnish AIDS worker tells about the sexual context sheds much
light on that population increase.

In its
politics, Zambia
has not seen a free election since the 1960s.

Zimbabwe:
Here, the Robert Mugabe government (in power since the blacks took power in
1980) encourages the “land invasions” of white farms.Mugabe speaks of whites as “snakes.”A result: there are “food riots” in Harare,
the capital.Unemployment is at 75
percent, inflation at 65 percent, despite salaries’ remaining low.There is “government-sanctioned torture and
murder”; the traditional healers, the mondhoro,
often call for the strangulation of a child as a sacrifice; and there are “body
parts killings,” as in Malawi,
to harvest organs for use in tribal medicine.

We have
seen how in Tanzania Nyerere caused all schoolbooks to be translated to
Swahili.The same insularity is perceived
as a virtue in Zimbabwe.Theroux says “a bill had been passed
stipulating that music, drama, news, and current affairs programming on Zimbabwe
radio and TV had to be purely Zimbabwean, ‘in order to foster a sense of
Zimbabwean national identity and values.’”

South
Africa: Theroux’s journey down
the eastern side of Africa ended with South
Africa.Much is still operating at an advanced level there, and he reports that
“almost everything worked, even the political system… The universities were excellent, the level of public debate was impressive….”We are surprised by the juxtaposition of
these observations with his many others: Theroux speaks of “the perverse
miracle of South African freeways and beautiful houses and dismal orderly
squatter settlements.”He went to a
squatter camp where he saw “the 8,500 inhabitants lived mainly in squalor…
There was no running water, there were no lights, nor
any trees.”The South African newspapers
constantly run accounts of “muggings, maimings, and robberies with gratuitous violence.In the quaintest story (sic) a man had been assaulted – one eye poked out, his throat
slashed, and his penis chopped off.”He
quotes the paper as saying that “police suspect that his genitals… will be used
for muti [medicine] by an inganga [witch doctor].”Earlier, we noted Theroux’s statistics about
20,000 murders and 52,000 reported rapes a year.As a personal irony, Theroux tells how he
left his belongings in a hotel’s safekeeping, only to have all of them stolen
anyway.

As in Zimbabwe,
an advanced civilization was bequeathed in South
Africa to a black majority – and there is
now the same active hostility to the whites who created it that exists in Zimbabwe.Theroux is informed of farm invasions “ending
in the disembowelment of the farmers,” and that 950 farmers have been murdered
since 1994 (although a white with whom he conversed said it was “twice that
number”).Whites refer to “our
holocaust,” and have compiled a book of photographs called Volksmoord/Genocide showing “dismemberments, decapitations, and
maimings.”“White flight,” similar to
that which has long occurred in the United
States, first from the city cores and most
recently from entire states, has beset the city of Johannesburg.

Accordingly,
a major conceptual issue looms.The
question that comes most obviously to mind in light of all that Theroux has
told us about the African people is whether the black majority will be able to
maintain the advanced economy and civilization passed to them not so very long
ago.From all indications, the answer is
no.But, oddly, Theroux never asks the
question.This may reflect his own
conceptual confusions, or he may know the answer and find it most convenient to
let the facts speak for themselves.

Other Themes in His
Narrative

His contempt for “agents of virtue.”A subject that runs through his narrative,
and that should be mentioned before any review is concluded, is his contempt
for the “aid experts” who drive all over Africa in
“spiffy white Land Rovers” and serve as “agents of virtue.”He says they “ranged from selfless idealists
to the laziest boondogglers cashing in on a crisis.”Everywhere, there is (and
has been for forty years) a series of “good-hearted, misguided efforts to
elevate Africans in a Western way.”New aid workers “did not realize that for forty years people had been
saying the same things, and the result after four
decades was a lower standard of living, a higher rate of illiteracy,
overpopulation, and much more disease.” While he was in Tanzania,
he reflected that “foreign charities… had been at it for decades and the
situation was more pathetic than ever.”

He says
that “foreigners working for development agencies did not stay long, so they
never discovered the full extent of their failure.”The Africans themselves do not take part in
the effort, and much of the money winds up in the pockets of their
politicians.Although many of the
“agents of virtue” are idealists, not all are in fact virtuous: “so much donor
aid is self-interested”; many aid workers enjoy the abundant prostitutes; and
“I was not shocked when I learned that the hotshots who doled out aid in some
African countries demanded sex from famine victims in return for the food
parcels.”The conclusion, according to
Theroux, is that he felt “a solemn sense that since only Africans could define
their problems, only Africans could fix them.”The Africans would not do so in a Western way, but in a way that would
reflect “a sort of nihilism that was also a form of serenity and a survival
skill.”

A substantial
literature has grown up, according to Theroux, to tell us these things.He refers to “the antidonor books, The Lords of Poverty and The Road to Hell,” which make the point
that “foreign aid has been destructive to Africa – has
actually caused harm.”Along the same
lines, the African economist George B. N. Ayttey has “documented the decline in
African fortunes as a result of donor aid” in Africa Betrayed and Africa in
Chaos.

Female circumcision.Theroux, as someone familiar with Western medicine, puzzles over the
rationale expressed to him for female circumcision, in which the clitoris is
cut off.One African man claimed it
vastly increases a woman’s sexuality.Although we have reason to doubt this, one thing is clear: sex looms
large in African life.Theroux hardly
visits a country without remarking upon the prostitutes.In Nanyuki in Kenya,
“prostitutes in tight dresses walked up and down in stiletto heels.”

Lynching.Lynching
is common.Theroux tells of the
mob-killing of a thief in the outskirts of Nairobi,
of the lynching of another thief in Zambia,
and of a mob’s beating to death a ghoulish healer (who cut the heads and other
body parts off of accident victims to use in his treatments) in Tanzania.For American readers, the significance of
these observations lies in knowing that the conventionally-accepted literature
on lynching in the United States claims that lynching has been a uniquely
American phenomenon (and especially a phenomenon of the American South), which
is said to be a manifestation of the United States’ being a uniquely violent
society and of Southern racism.There is
much evidence to suggest that this claim is a myth, fashioned out of
ideology.It requires a studied refusal
to see what happens elsewhere in the world.

The world of spirits.A spirit-world has long been a part of African belief-systems.An illustration comes when Theroux tells us
that “in a village such as Marka, in the Lower River District of Malawi, no one
is dead.If people appear to vanish from
their corporeal existence, it is just a ducking out before returning as
spirits.”This is consistent with the
extensive description ofthe belief in
witchcraft, ghosts, fetishes, dreams and shadows as real entities, and
ubiquitous spirits that Robert Milligan gave a century ago after living for
several years as a Presbyterian missionary in western Africa (in Gaboon,
Cameroon and the French Congo).(See his The Jungle Folk of
Africa, 1908, pp. 249-270.)Milligan described a mentality that is diametrically opposite to the
science that is basic to modern civilization (and is very much like the
belief-systems that prevailed in Europe in both medieval
and ancient times): “Those phenomena which attract the African’s attention he
ascribes immediately to a supernatural cause.He does not look for a natural cause.If a tree falls across his path, somebody threw it.The activity of spirits accounts for everything.”Within such a frame of reference, the
individual inhabits, in effect, a totally different world than we do.

This leads
to such a thing as the 2003 vampire scare.The president of Malawi
had to formally deny “that his government was ‘sucking people’s blood in
exchange for maize donations from abroad.’”The governor of one of the provinces was stoned, Theroux reports, “for
being suspected of ‘harboring bloodsuckers.’”The same mentality leads to “body parts killings,” which caused nineteen
people to be killed and eviscerated in Malawi
in 2003 for use of their organs as “mankhwala” [medicine].

Cannibalism.It
is odd that Theroux tells his readers that “cannibalism had never been
institutionalized by Africans in the Congo…
The suggestion of flesh eating was just another racist dig….”He doesn’t tell his source for saying
this.It runs counter to
much that is known about the Congo
and equatorial Africa in general.

In Into Africa: The
Epic Adventure of Stanley & Livingstone (Doubleday, 2003), Martin
Dugard tells how Livingstone once fled Nyangwe, located on the upper Congo
(the LualabaRiver),
and made his way east to Ujiji.The
path, Dugard says, was “through virgin jungle and country populated by
cannibals.”In fact, it was “the heart
of cannibal country.”He tells how
Livingstone entered into his journal of May
27, 1871, that “a stranger in the market had ten human
under-jawbones hung on a string over his shoulder.On inquiry he professed to have killed and
eaten the owners… When I expressed disgust, he and others laughed.”Surprisingly, among the cannibals of Manyuema
“the bodies were not cooked before eating, but soaked in running water for
several days until bloated and tender.”

In The River Congo (Harper & Row,
1977), Peter Forbath says “I first saw the Congo
during one of the bloodiest moments… The place was Stanleyville
(now called Kisangani); the time,
the Simba uprising of 1964.For 110
days… the Simbas, a jungle army of cannibal warriors… held Stanleyville
in a reign of terror… Mutilated corpses lay in the streets, some partially
devoured….”Speaking of the Bantu,
Forbath says that “when Stanley
first came down the river these people were cannibals, and they are known to
indulge in the grisly practice occasionally still, for ritual reasons, out of
hunger, simply for the taste of it.”He
tells how along the LualabaRiver
in 1874 “row upon row of human skulls lined the palisades around the villages,
and bones from every part of the human anatomy could be seen scattered around
the cooking sites.”

E. J. Glave
was one of Henry Stanley’s officers, first going to the Congo
in 1883.In 1890, Glave wrote an
extensive description of conditions in the Congo
for Century Magazine (Vol. 39, pp.
824-838) under the title “The Slave-Trade in the CongoBasin.”He observed that slavery was the center of a
tribal chief’s wealth.Some of the
slaves were exchanged to Arab traders, whose slave trade was still going on,
for transport to Turkey
and elsewhere.Others, held in the vast
system of internal slavery, were ritually executed – decapitation for the men,
strangulation for the women -- to commemorate such occasions as the death of
the chief’s mother.The many others were
held as livestock to be eaten.He told
of the thriving trade carried on by the tribes between the Ubangi
and Lulungu rivers.“These natives buy
their slaves solely for food.Having purchased
slaves they feed them on ripe bananas, fish, and oil, and when they get them
into good condition they kill them.” Glave wrote that “cannibalism exists among
all the peoples on the Upper Congo east of 16 degrees E.
longitude, and is prevalent to an even greater extent among the people
inhibiting the banks of the numerous affluents.”

These
sources’ information suggests that Theroux, while excellent in his personal
observations, allows himself sometimes to be deluded by the ideological
folklore that often passes for fact in today’s world.To attribute the reports of cannibalism in Africa’s
history to a “racist dig” is itself a racist comment, aimed at Westerners.Here again we see Theroux’s conceptual
confusion, which runs right alongside his perceptual honesty.

Conclusion.This
review has told the highlights of Dark
Star Safari, and critiqued some of them; but the book itself must be read
to obtain the full flavor of eastern Africa and the
story of Theroux’s own close scrapes as he made the journey.